Harvard’s Verdine Blazing Trail for Scientific Entrepreneurs
Summary
Harvard’s Verdine Blazing Trail for Scientific Entrepreneurs Xconomy National — If you’re a tenured biomedical researcher at a university today, and you have a big idea for what could be a new drug or diagnostic test, you can do a couple things.Verdine’s plan is to then hopefully come back to Harvard as a ‘professor in the practice’ who teaches and does research, but works on a five-year renewable contract instead of a tenure deal.Elias Zerhouni, the president of global R&D at Sanofi, says he did a similar thing earlier in his career when he was at Johns Hopkins University and felt compelled to ask for—and get—a two-year leave of absence to pursue an entrepreneurial dream.Zerhouni, who helped create Warp Drive Bio with Verdine, sees a lot of potential for other entrepreneurial faculty members to follow this kind of career path.The classic problem is that the university wants to drive a hard bargain, make sure it’s not getting fleeced, maybe doesn’t understand all the development work that needs to be done by industry.